Jack Gold, film director - obituary

Jack Gold, who has died aged 85, was a film and television director who often cast an acerbic eye on the shortcomings of the British establishment and whose best work was rooted in the realist tradition.

He combined gritty subjects with a literate sensibility and drew heavily on his early training in short documentaries. One of his best-known films was the First World War flying drama Aces High (1976, starring Malcolm McDowell and Christopher Plummer), based on the R C Sherriff play Journey’s End. Gold brought the action out of the trenches and into the skies; the American critic Leonard Maltin commended the film’s “strong anti-war statement” as much as its “exciting aerial dogfights”. The production illustrated Gold’s fondness for high-class source material – he also brought works by Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy and PG Wodehouse to the screen – and stories that dealt with the sharp end of life.

Perhaps his greatest achievement for television was his adaptation of Quentin Crisp’s memoirs The Naked Civil Servant (1975). The drama starred John Hurt as Crisp, the flamboyant homosexual writer and raconteur who was widely pilloried and lived out his winter years exiled in Manhattan, and made a star of Hurt. “One of the more extraordinary dramas ever created for television,” one critic noted. “The 78-minute film holds up wonderfully the second, or even third, time around.”

In 1983 he directed Good and Bad at Games for Channel 4 television, working from an original script by William Boyd. Its subject-matter – the effects of bullying in public schools – suited the director’s talent for scrutinising institutions. In the film The Bofors Gun (1968), with Nicol Williamson and Ian Holm (plus John Thaw as a gunner), Gold highlighted the dehumanising discipline of National Service, while the comedy The National Health (1973, an adaptation of Peter Nichols’s play) found him lampooning the NHS.

Jack Gold was born on June 28 1930 in north London, the son of Charles and Minnie (née Elbery). He studied first Economics and then Law at University College London where he was involved with the college film society.

On graduation he joined the BBC, progressing from studio manager in radio to editor on schools programmes and the Tonight current affairs programme. It was there, working alongside Fyfe Robertson, Alan Whicker and others that his social consciousness was developed, as he worked on several short slots each week (the first story that he edited was about a works outing). His later 40-minute special, titled Death in the Afternoon, explored the fox-hunting debate; Gold created a fox’s-eye view of the action. The film won him a Bafta.

Gold left the BBC in 1964 to go freelance and focus on drama. His satirical feature My Father Knew Lloyd George (1965) saw John Bird playing Queen Victoria alongside John Fortune and Alan Bennett, while The Lump in 1967, for BBC’s Wednesday Play series, dealt with bad practices in the building trade.

During the 1970s he made films ranging from genre fodder to more personal work. Who? (1973, also known as Robo Man) blended Cold War anxieties with science-fiction cliche while The Medusa Touch (1978) was a supernatural horror film starring Richard Burton as a writer who deploys his “psychokinetic” powers to catastrophic effect (critics did not warm to either picture).

In 1975 Gold subverted the Robinson Crusoe story with Man Friday, starring Peter O’Toole as an unenlightened Englishman who cannot accept that an island native (Richard Roundtree) is his equal in intellect and more emotionally developed. The film was critical of colonialist attitudes in Daniel Defoe’s novel, and won Gold a nomination for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

He returned to the theme of racial divide with The Sailor’s Return (1978), based on a novel by David Garnett; the story concerned a Victorian sea captain who attempts to make a life on shore with his new black wife.

In the early 1980s Gold worked with Quintet Films, an independent production company, alongside Jack Rosenthal, Willy Russell and the theatre director Mike Ockrent. One of their productions was Good and Bad at Games; the screenwriter, William Boyd, found the process “an amazing education” and said that he “could not have had a more benign or surer hand guiding” him.

During the 1980s and 1990s Gold focused on television commissions. He produced episodes for the BBC’s Screen Two, Play for Today and Shakespeare productions but his speciality was the one-off television film. He filmed Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man (1988, starring Anthony Hopkins), and Escape from Sobibor (1987), which told the true story of an uprising and mass escape from a Nazi extermination camp in Poland. The Chain (1984), which was released at cinemas, was a whimsical comedy about seven families moving house, featuring Denis Lawson. It was an inventive way to bring a cross-section of society to the big screen.

Gold also acted as producer on occasion and in the theatre. His stage productions include Robin Bates’s Three Hotel (1993) and Julia Pascal’s Crossing Jerusalem (2003), both at the Tricycle Theatre.

His swansong was the TV film Goodnight Mister Tom (1998), an affecting Second World War tale of a shy evacuee who is befriended by an old man (John Thaw). It won best drama category at the National Television Awards and the Lew Grade award for most popular programme at the Baftas. He worked again with Thaw on Kavanagh QC and the final episode of Inspector Morse.

Gold won Baftas for The World of Coppard (1969) and Stocker’s Copper (a Play of Today episode) in 1973 and Evening Standard Film Awards for Aces High and The National Health. He was a calm presence on set and taught his craft with enthusiasm at the London International Film School, the Royal College of Art and the National Film and Television School.

“You can have all the rhythm in the world, but if you’re not telling the story, there’s no impact, there’s nothing to watch,” he once told students at a directing masterclass. “Film-making is like storytelling; it takes so long because it’s a ceaseless search for perfection.”

Jack Gold married, in 1957, Denyse Macpherson, who survives him, along with their two sons and daughter.